How to create customer attributes for projects – Part 1

The steps presented in the two blogs (Part 1 and Part 2) explain, respectively:

– The difference between customer attributes for objects and project keywords (Part 1)

– How to create a database table for customer attributes (Part 1)

– How to define customer attributes for objects in IMG and (Part 2)

– How to assign the attributes to objects in projects (Part 2).

Difference between customer attributes for objects and project keywords

You can use keywords and customer attributes in your projects to tag documents and objects (i.e. transactions, structure nodes, customizing and development objects) with project specific information for example to distinguish client dependent/independent customizing or country specific objects/process steps. Usage of keywords and customer attributes is especially important when dealing with localization; and for reporting and search functionality in SAP Solution Manager. You can search projects (using transaction SOLAR_EVAL) by keywords and customer attributes.

It is important to remember that keyword usage is limited to a project. Keywords are not copied between projects and solutions and are not used in other ALM scenarios (e.g. BPCA or BP&IM). That’s why it should be considered upfront when to use keywords and when to use customer attributes in the project setup phase:

Use keywords only for project specific tagging.

Keywords should be used only to characterize project specific work. If you intend to tag your business process structure with values relevant for post-implementation phase, then define and use customer attributes instead. This will also ensure that you can use the business process specific information during the testing phase for change impact analysis (to utilize functionalities such as Business Process Change Analyzer and Test Scope Optimization).

This example shows when it makes sense to used keywords. There are customer objects (WRICEF objects) documented in a project. Some of the objects have been already used in the production landscape and some of them need to be modified because of new requirements. The rest of customer objects documented in the project have to be created as this is a new development. In this case, the following keywords can be used to tag the customer objects:

“New” – for the new development

“Re-Work” – for the customer objects which have to be adjusted

In this case, the keywords were used because they describe project specific work only. Having such keywords, it will allow monitoring the development scope and progress for the project.

Keywords are defined easily and directly in the project in transaction SOLAR_PROJECT_ADMIN, on tab “Project Standards”.

b. Use customer attributes (object attributes and document attributes) in your projects to ensure the information is passed in all ALM phases (keywords are not copied between projects and solutions and not used in BPCA or BP&IM).

Common examples of customer attributes would be attributes characterizing the business process priority: e.g. High, Medium and Low or country specific information: e.g. Brazil, US, Italy etc.

Customer attributes can be defined and used not only for the business process structure but also for objects (e.g. transactions, development/customizing objects) and documents.

1 Comment

I’m Daniel and I work very often in Solman – Process and Project Management.

Your Input and documentation is very nice, thanks a lot.

Usually I use Key Words in Projects mainly for Project controlling reasons to track and manag the status according to the project organisation. Therefore, I ask for the project org chart. Then, I set the key works according the project subteams , project streams. Additionally, I use Keywords to manage the project phases (Waves) in Rollouts or to assign the process scope to the project phases, wich is very helpful in cluster rollout.

Attributes, I use it as well to classify processes according

– Criticallity IT / Criticallity Business

– SAP Module assignment

– Business divisions / Departments

– Countries

– Compliance relevance (GxP, SOX, …)

– Add ons from partners.

My experience is, that most of my customers use my proposal. For that reason, we defined kind of best practice with predefined customer attribute tables.